The Political Economy of Redistribution under Democracy

We ask what redistributions of income and assets are feasible in a democracy, given the initial assets and their distribution. The question is motivated by the possibility that if redistribution is insufficient for the poor or excessive for the rich, they may turn against democracy. In turn, if no redistribution simultaneously satisfies the poor and the wealthy, democracy cannot be sustained. Hence, the corollary question concerns the conditions under which democracy is sustainable. Since decisions to save are endogenous, we solve explicitly for the current growth rates given any time path of future tax rates. We find that the optimal path of redistribution chosen by the median voter under the constraint of rebellion by the poor or the wealthy consists of redistributing as much as possible as soon as possible. However, this path is time inconsistent unless voters punish governments that deviate from their promises. Democracies survive in wealthy societies, with a lower average capital stock when they are more equal.Sustainable Democracy, Optimal Taxes

The development of chemically modified electrodes for electrocatalysis

Imperial Users onl

Interpreting the dependence of mutation rates on age and time

Mutations can arise from the chance misincorporation of nucleotides during DNA replication or from DNA lesions that are not repaired correctly. We introduce a model that relates the source of mutations to their accumulation with cell divisions, providing a framework for understanding how mutation rates depend on sex, age and absolute time. We show that the accrual of mutations should track cell divisions not only when mutations are replicative in origin but also when they are non-replicative and repaired efficiently. One implication is that the higher incidence of cancer in rapidly renewing tissues, an observation ascribed to replication errors, could instead reflect exogenous or endogenous mutagens. We further find that only mutations that arise from inefficiently repaired lesions will accrue according to absolute time; thus, in the absence of selection on mutation rates, the phylogenetic "molecular clock" should not be expected to run steadily across species.Comment: 5 figures, 2 table

Peaceful transitions of power have been rare in modern states, but once the habit has been acquired it sticks

What incentives are there for non-democratic governments to agree to risk losing power in elections? Based on an analysis of over 3,000 elections which have taken place across the world since 1788, Adam Przeworski writes that the practice of peacefully changing governments via the ballot box has been a relatively rare occurrence in modern history. Nevertheless, he notes that while it is difficult to establish the first peaceful transition of power in a state, once the principle has been implemented it often becomes entrenched over time

Consensus, Conflict, and Compromise in Western Thought on Representative Government

AbstractRepresentative government in the West was born under an ideology that postulated a basic harmony of interests in society. The political decision process was thus expected to be largely consensual. This ideology obfuscated important conflicts of values and interests, and it became untenable with the rise of mass, class-based and religious parties. Beginning with Kelsen (1923) and culminating with Schumpeter (1942), theorists of representative government conceptualized it as a system for processing conflicts. In one view, representation is assured by compromises among parties, in another by partisan alternation in office

O umijeću pisanja projektnih prijedloga

Prijevod s engleskog: Silva Mežnarić (Studeni 1994.

Dehn surgery, homology and hyperbolic volume

If a closed, orientable hyperbolic 3--manifold M has volume at most 1.22 then H_1(M;Z_p) has dimension at most 2 for every prime p not 2 or 7, and H_1(M;Z_2) and H_1(M;Z_7) have dimension at most 3. The proof combines several deep results about hyperbolic 3--manifolds. The strategy is to compare the volume of a tube about a shortest closed geodesic C in M with the volumes of tubes about short closed geodesics in a sequence of hyperbolic manifolds obtained from M by Dehn surgeries on C.Comment: This is the version published by Algebraic & Geometric Topology on 8 December 200

Inferring the Demographic History and Rate of Adaptive Substitution in Drosophila

An important goal of population genetics is to determine the forces that have shaped the pattern of genetic variation in natural populations. We developed a maximum likelihood method that allows us to infer demographic changes and detect recent positive selection (selective sweeps) in populations of varying size from DNA polymorphism data. Applying this approach to single nucleotide polymorphism data at more than 250 noncoding loci on the X chromosome of Drosophila melanogaster from an (ancestral) African population and a (derived) European, we found that the African population expanded about 60,000 y ago and that the European population split off from the African lineage about 15,800 y ago, thereby suffering a severe population size bottleneck. We estimated that about 160 beneficial mutations (with selection coefficients s between 0.05% and 0.5%) were fixed in the euchromatic portion of the X in the African population since population size expansion, and about 60 mutations (with s around 0.5%) in the diverging European lineage